Reenactments, Zebqine

Two months after Israeli bombs fell on the village of Zebqine in southern Lebanon, I was invited to do a project there. The buildings were still rubble. The first thing I saw was a poet standing amidst debris that had been his library, singed books scattered around his yard. He stood in the middle of his rubble, reading a half-burnt volume.
Children in town made images with me of the impact of the war. I asked each of them to draw a map of their village as it was when they were children and to mark where a specific memory occurred on that map. They then visited that site and reenacted the memory in a Polaroid photograph. In an attempt to revive those memories in the landscape, we installed the resulting Polaroids into the sites.
This was my first time to Lebanon, even though my ancestors come from Hasbayah, a village very near Zebqine. Our gestures of remembering what was now lost felt small in the face of the recent violence of war that rained down on Zebqine, but as I held conversations with people there and scoured the landscape for traces of my own family, reenacting familiar memories also felt significant.
[This project exists as a series of small reproductions of the original Polaroids, prints documenting this process and the maps made by the youth participants. The original Polaroids were installed at the sites of their creation.]
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